Their Eyes were Watching God

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Miss Hurston has fulfilled the early promise of her first books. Her writing is of the essence of poetry, deeply communicative, possessed of a primitive rhythm that speaks truly to the consciousness even before thought can form. This new novel is one of warmth and humor and rich, transcendent beauty. Janie's conscious life had begun at Grandma's gate. When Nanny had spied Janie letting Johnny Taylor kiss her over the gatepost she had called Janie to come inside the house. That had been the end of her childhood. Soon after that Janie and Logan Killicks were married in Nanny's parlor. But love did not come to Janie as Nanny had told her it would. And one day Joe Starks, "from in and through Georgy," came walking down the road. Though he did not represent sun-up and pollen and blooming trees, Joe spoke for far horizons, for change and chance, and Janie at last agreed to go off with him. But in the years of their marriage Janie was never very happy with him. When Joe died, Janie was not yet forty and still a handsome woman. She had refused more than one offer of marriage before the day that Tea Cake stepped into the store. He was younger than she, so much younger that at first Janie dared not believe in the happiness he brought to her. But their life together told her all that she needed to know. This is the story of Miss Hurston's own people, but it is also a story of all peoples--of man and of woman, and of the mystery that the world holds. --J.B. Lipincott (original edition) foreword